Richard von Weizsacker

Richard von Weizsacker (15 April 1920-31 January 2015) was the President of West Germany from 1 July 1984 to 2 October 1990, succeeding Karl Carestens, and was President of a reunified Germany from 3 October 1990 to 30 June 1994, preceding Roman Herzog.

Biography
Richard von Weizsacker was born on 15 April 1920 in the New Castle of Stuttgart, Baden-Wurttemberg, Weimar Republic to the noted Weizsacker family, son of diplomat Ernst von Weizsacker. In 1937, he moved to the United Kingdom and studied history and philosophy at Balliol College in Oxford, England, before studying at the University of Grenoble in France. During World War II, he was drafted into the Wehrmacht and served as a captain in the Fuhrersreserve, and was wounded fighting the Red Army in East Prussia in 1945. After the war, he worked as a banker, and in 1954 he joined the Christian Democratic Union of West Germany. From 1969 to 1981 he was a member of the Bundestag for the CDU, and from 1971 to 1981 he was Vice President of the Bundestag. In addition, from 1981 to 1984 he was the Mayor of West Berlin. He irritated the United States, France, and the UK by having special obligations and interests in East Berlin and meeting East German Communist Party chief Erich Honecker.

Weizsacker was elected President of West Germany in 1984, and he drew support from both the center-right and the Social Democratic Party opposition party. In 1985, on 8 May, he commemorated the "liberation day" of the end of World War II. Weizsacker was one of the first German politicians to apologize for the massacre of homosexuals in addition to Jews, and he said that Germany's younger generations did not need to feel the guilt of crimes that they did not commit. In October 1985, he visited Israel and met President Chaim Herzog, and he was greeted with an honor guard. Even the right-wingers of the Herut faction of the Likud party of Yitzhak Shamir, who refused to greet German leaders, shook his hand. It was the first visit by a head of state to Israel, although Chancellor Willy Brandt had previously visited Israel in June 1973.

Because of his high popularity, he was elected without opposition on 23 May 1989, and on 2 October 1990 he became the first leader of a reunified Germany (he was the first head-of-state of all of Germany since Karl Doenitz in 1945). Weizsacker was the first West German head of state to visit Poland, and he said that the borders would be inviolable. In 1992, he gave a eulogy for Willy Brandt at the Reichstag in the first state funeral for a Chancellor since 1929, when Gustav Stresemann died. He visited the funerals of neo-Nazi victims, and in March 1994 he attended the Frankfurt premiere of Schindler's List with Israeli ambassador Avi Primor, commemorating the salvation of several Jews by Oskar Schindler. After the end of his term, Weizsacker resumed charity work, and he died on 31 January 2015 at the age of 94.